by Nayeri, Dina
“I . . .” Saba begins.
“All this death talk,” Abbas says. He sounds frail, so obsessed with his mortality. Saba is disgusted with her choice. He excuses himself to go home and doesn’t return.
“You children,” says Agha Mansoori. “I may be old and ignorant, but I know my own wife.” He wipes his face and fixes it into a prophetic scowl. He gathers up all the foreboding in his body and flings it with a small voice. “She will haunt you all.”
Saba goes to him and puts an arm around his shoulder. He sniffs, and wags his prescient forefinger in their faces. Agha Hafezi sighs as he launches into pleas, assurances, grand and eloquent speeches about life, death, and eternity. The old man sobs quietly throughout the speech. Afterward, in the drawn-out silence filled with the collective worry and expectation of the families, he coughs into a graying handkerchief and reveals that he hasn’t been listening at all. “Ten days isn’t good for much. But I’m tired, Agha jan. I don’t think I’ll last very long.”
“I don’t know what to do.” Agha Hafezi, frustrated, speaks to no one in particular. Somehow everyone knows that Agha Hafezi, not the Mansoori family, will make the decision. He rubs his eyes with his thumb and forefinger, exhausted. The old man takes Saba’s arm for support.
“Ehsan jan, I promise to stop troubling you in ten days’ time,” he says.
Saba remembers the day her mother and Khanom Mansoori taught her how to lay dough inside the walls of her grandfather’s tanoor in their kitchen. How many days before the airport incident was it? Did her mother disappear a week later? A month later? On that day Khanom Mansoori said the same phrase to Saba’s mother—because no one else had a tanoor and she wanted to make bread for her brother who came from the South and wasn’t used to rice for every meal. I promise to stop troubling you in a few days’ time.
“This is insanity. We’re not leaving you to do that to yourself,” says Agha Hafezi.
“Nothing to be done, Agha jan. I’m old. And I haven’t slept well in a long time.”
And so they wait. Khanom Mansoori is washed, shrouded, and kept in Agha Hafezi’s cavelike storage room, just a short walk from the house with its Western kitchen and bags of rice, old-world tanoor from out of town, and Saba’s beloved pantry.
The next day Mullah Ali visits. When he hears of the plan, he is livid. “I won’t allow it. It’s wrong, and goes against Islamic law. She must be buried immediately.”
Saba has never hated the mullah more. Look at all the other laws he has overlooked for his own pleasure. What about the parties? What about Mustafa, who went unpunished? Surely this is not the time to be strict. “What do you suggest?” she says coldly.
The mullah thinks for a moment and turns to Agha Hafezi. “We will bury her now and tell him she is still in the storeroom—just while he’s in the worst of the suffering. Then we will order the tombstone with both of their names to satisfy him. Of course, we will need a real one too. I’m sure he’ll relent after a while, and we can quietly mark her tomb with her own stone,” he adds in Gilaki. “Hafezi, can you oblige us?”
“Of course,” says Saba’s father, happy to pay for whatever will get the body out of his storeroom. It is a good solution, full of convenient half-truths and maast-mali.
For days Saba keeps a constant watch over the grieving widower, making sure he does no harm to himself. She tells him stories, plays him all her favorite television shows, tries to entice him to eat. She goes along with the lies—that Khanom Mansoori is waiting for him in the storeroom and that he can’t visit her because she has to be kept cool and dry. Oh yes, everything’s fine, she mutters, as if she were lying about a relative in jail. Soon she realizes that she shouldn’t worry about suicide since Agha Mansoori considers it a sin. What’s more worrisome is that the old man is determined to die a natural death so that he can join his wife. He does everything possible to fool the fates. He casually peels the labels off his medications so that Saba has to make sure they are in their correct bottles after every use (they never are), “forgets” to turn off ovens and lamps, invites the chilly air and jackals in through the constantly open windows of his tiny wood-and-rice-straw home. On a good day, when he engages in conversation, she learns that he has eaten the same thing every week for fifty years: his wife’s baghaleh ghatogh with rice. Saba has seen him eat this dish before, always with a side of pickled garlic and piles of white rice, without utensils, using the tips of his thumb and two fingers to smash the individual grains into a buttery ball. Saba marvels at the impressive morsels he can pick up with just those three fingers. Maybe she will try to make him Khanom Mansoori’s famous dish. After all, it’s her job to keep him alive.
For a few days she forgets about Dr. Zohreh and all the injustices against women and dedicates herself to this one feeble man instead. For days, as Saba attempts to prepare his wife’s dish, Agha Mansoori gives a sad and noncommittal string of commentary. “A bit more garlic, child. No, no, less dill . . . well, doesn’t matter, I’ll die soon anyway.” He cowers just beyond Saba’s shoulder, his body protesting the act of standing upright—as well as eating and breathing—his eyes resolutely following her hand. She soaks the lima beans and peels them. Agha Mansoori watches as she fries them using the exact amount of garlic, dill, turmeric, and eggs that he instructs. She pours the mixture over a fluffy bed of white rice, not sparing the butter in any step of the process. In the end, he takes a bite and says, “You tried, Saba jan. You tried. But I just can’t taste her hand.”
“Will you eat it anyway?” she begs, and when he does, she feels gratified, as if he has done her a great favor.
On the seventh day after his wife’s death, Agha Mansoori oversees the preparations of halva and dates to be given out to the mourners. “We have to have plenty, Saba jan, because if we sweeten the mouths of our neighbors, they will pray for her soul, which is essential if we’re going to be together in a few days.”
“I’m sure she’s in heaven now,” Saba says, certain that even a Christian God would take Khanom Mansoori for himself. She counts the halva anyway, just in case.
He mumbles as if frightened. “Better to be safe.” Then he requests that, when he dies, she match the amount of halva and dates exactly.
As he makes his way through town, passing out the halva with Saba, Agha Mansoori sings adoringly of his wife. Like a young lover, he crows about how beautiful she was on their wedding day, how sweetly she took care of their family, how lovingly she decorated their home. He goes on about his wife’s “delicious hand,” and Saba promises herself that she will have this, even if she has to wait a hundred years and outlive everyone. Maybe she will have it with Reza, or maybe she will find her lover many decades from now. She will be his nurse when they are both old and frail and there is no one left to care for either of them.
Eight days pass and Saba grows concerned. She watches the wrinkles in Agha Mansoori’s brown face grow into trenches, engulfing his beady hazel eyes in their folds. She sees his jowls reach for the earth while the bend in his back urgently makes for the sky. What will happen when the deadline passes? How will this poor old man go on? She shares her fears with her own husband, who has experienced the pain of losing a wife.
“He will go on,” Abbas says plainly. “He will move past it.”
“He seems so weak,” she says. “He’s determined to die.”
“Don’t worry, child,” is Abbas’s only response.
Saba looks at her husband and is emboldened by the peaceful expression on his face. She remembers the tender way Agha Mansoori looked at his wife as he made her fruit mush and blew on her tea, and the way she once felt about Reza. Such things are possible still, even here. She feels a deep courage, a desire to make an effort on her own behalf, an awareness of her own dying body. And Abbas’s.
“Abbas,” she begins timidly. “Can I ask you for something?”
“Anything, azizam.
”
“I’ve been very happy with you, I hope you realize.” Abbas smiles deeply, and Saba is encouraged to go on. “But we’re so far apart . . . in age.”
She can see that Abbas assumes—like all men do—that she is already mourning the possibility of his death. “We have many years left together,” he reassures her.
“Yes, but after . . .” Saba looks down. I’ll still be a virgin. They haven’t discussed their arrangement since that morning a few months ago. Abbas is silent, so she continues. “Would you want me to marry again?” She wonders if she should assure him that she hasn’t told anyone about his private failures, that she never will. The smile has fallen from his face, and she fears she has already said too much. He can’t possibly enjoy having her youth and the possibilities that await her after his death flaunted before him.
“What is this about?” His voice becomes gruff.
What Saba wants to ask, the thing she hopes for the most, is that he will testify to the nonconsummation of their marriage in a letter intended only for a future husband. Surely this can’t cause any harm. Surely he must realize that it is in her best interest to conceal the truth so that she can inherit his fortune. So, Saba reasons, he must have no fears of her speaking out publicly. And in any case, why wouldn’t he help her in this small way? If it causes him no embarrassment, why wouldn’t he give her this small insurance policy against a second loveless marriage in the event that she never makes it to America? Is she being greedy? Saba braces herself. She has to ask him for this one thing. Otherwise who would ever believe she is a virgin? She would never have a chance with a man her own age, one whom she might love more than even Mahtab.
“I was just thinking,” she begins carefully, “how well-suited we are for each other.” She gathers together every ounce of sincerity she can muster into a tight ball that she flings at Abbas with each calculated word. “I would never say anything to hurt you.” Confusion colors Abbas’s face. “But would you want me to marry again?”
His expression darkens. “I don’t think I’d have much say then.”
She sighs. “You could write a letter. I would never show it to anyone. Write down our secret, and I promise to protect it for us.” Her voice shakes with desperation, and she is ashamed now at having entered this conversation. She touches his hand.
“Azizam,” he says, “if I write it down, your inheritance would be in danger.”
“That’s why you can trust me. It’s something we can do for each other.”
Abbas laughs at her cunning. “My smart little wife,” he says, and taps her hand listlessly. Then, without answering, he gets up to go to bed. “I don’t want to talk about death anymore,” he mumbles over his shoulder as he makes his way through the house.
On the ninth night, in a fit of bad sleep likely caused by the impending funeral and their soon-to-be-permanent separation, Agha Mansoori takes a last breath and joins his wife. Afraid of what she will find, Saba doesn’t return to his house to check his medicines. She doesn’t smell the air or browse for guilty purchases. She says good-bye and promises to be his witness before God that he never harmed himself. She passes out the exact amount of halva that was offered during his wife’s mourning period.
Saba and her father help the family shroud Agha Mansoori in the storeroom and carry him out to be buried beside his wife under the double tombstone. Father and daughter stand side by side, each saying a silent prayer. Each missing a lost other self. Saba wonders to which God her confused father is praying now. Probably to the God of his wife, whom he followed devotedly all the time he was with her. His breathing is shallow and pained, his eyes bloodshot. Long after the family leaves with the clerics, Saba and her father remain in the cavelike hollow built into the hillside, silently watching, thinking. How much has changed since her mother left . . . to go where?
“Baba, tell me what happened to Maman?” Her voice echoes through the dark length of the open storeroom. It is a long, tubelike structure that narrows toward an invisible end, its walls of mud and rock rough-hewn, its deep crevices unexplored. Saba wraps her arms around her shivering body and glances at the cartons of food, the black-market products bought at steep prices, the foreign luxuries—digestive biscuits, La Vache Qui Rit soft cheese, Johnson’s Baby Shampoo, Canada Dry, nothing all that perishable—hidden in the deepest clefts.
Agha Hafezi takes a tired breath. “I’m sorry,” he says, “I can’t give you what you want, Saba jan. I have my theories. I’ve looked. You saw how my letter was returned, and they never told me anything. I had to divorce her or risk losing you and our life.”
Saba tries not to fidget. “But what about America? When did she go to jail?”
Her father shakes his head. “The airport was chaos. You ran away and I had to chase you. And then I turned around and she was gone. I saw the pasdars and then I couldn’t find her again. I spent days calling people.” He sounds weak. He fixes his gaze beyond her shoulder. “Later someone told me they saw her in the prison, but I said it can’t be. She can’t have gone there, because my Saba saw her get on the plane and it must be so. It must be so, because my daughter is so smart. She sees everything and she doesn’t lie.”
For years Saba has imagined the moment when her father would admit that her mother is in America. His words, she dreamed, would be the plank that would keep her afloat. But now, on hearing that her own foggy perception has been her father’s plank, all support disappears beneath her, plunging her into the icy water. How reliable is this single scrap of memory that she has worn out over the years like a fading photograph? For an instant the picture of the elegant lady in the blue manteau and green scarf becomes clear again. Her mother steps out of the hazy terminal and smiles at Saba. She clutches Mahtab’s hand and steps easily past the crowds onto the plane.
A dozen questions fight for space. Did Maman call from America? Can Mullah Ali help? Why did the pasdars arrest her? If she never made the flight, where is Mahtab?
“She never contacted me again,” her father says with painful finality. She watches his throat move as he swallows hard, and she thinks that her Mahtab stories have hurt him, kept him from moving forward because he is too afraid to force her to accept his truth. When she starts to speak, he says, “Enough,” his voice taut and pitchy. He crosses the storeroom to return to his memories, leaving Saba to the numbing consolation of her music and movies, unaware of the distress in which she has left her unhappy husband, who, after months of marriage, has finally opened his eyes to his own disposability.
String-Fingered Dallak
(Khanom Basir)
The Hafezis were book types and strange; there was so much they didn’t teach those girls. Once, when they were nine years old, they got into trouble for shaving their legs to the knee and plucking three hairs from the space between their eyebrows. Three hairs. I wanted to ask Bahareh why she was so strict with woman things, but you know how it is—ask the camel why it’s pissing backward and it says, “When did I ever do anything like anyone else?” Bahareh thought she was teaching her girls to be important.
They weren’t allowed to shave anything, or perfume anything, or pluck anything. She didn’t want them to grow up too soon or become women before she was ready. The only grooming they were allowed was to rub the bottom of their feet with a pumice stone—because soft feet were the sign that they were Hafezi daughters and not one of their field-workers: important. Their mother checked their legs every day, especially after the revolution, to make sure they weren’t breaking her rules. Be strict with the small rules, and teach them to risk their necks breaking the big ones. Such craziness! Sometimes I thought I was the only sane person in twenty kilometers.
What pointless rules! Northern girls are hard workers and not at all plagued by vanity. When Gilaki women talk about indulgences, we mostly mean food. But then one day Bahareh told her daughters to avoid riding bikes, which is necessary with all o
ur hilly roads. Most normal children ride because they have to earn a living. “You’re young women,” she said. “You will tear your curtain.” Even with her modern ways, her Western clothes, Bahareh followed the old when it came to sex and raising girls.
“What curtain?” Saba asked, and her mother said to stop asking questions. Apparently some stupid girl had used the bike story on her wedding night, and the Hafezis didn’t want their daughters to have any excuses. Ridiculous. Girls will always have excuses. A fox will always have his tail as a witness.
Even with all her medical books, their mother didn’t tell them about men and women and such things. On the day Saba began to bleed, it was I who had to tell her she wasn’t dying. You see, Bahareh was afraid that they would discover boys and turn their backs on her grand Western dreams. She wanted her twins to stay young and untouched forever. Bookish, full of plans and ambitions, forever belonging only to her.
And so they grew up strangely, with almost no information about their own bodies. I wonder how Saba is managing now that she’s married. Probably the old man doesn’t have many needs that require womanly skill or scrutiny. You see, they are a good match.
One day Bahareh and I were in the private hammam in the Hafezi house while she was getting her string treatment, her preferred method since she hated the smell of the pastes. We didn’t hear Saba searching the house for us. Then she just appeared there. Bahareh sat up and pulled a towel over her chest, but Saba had already seen everything. It was a dry treatment—no steam and fog to disappear in. Imagine how it must have looked to the girl. Try to see it through her innocent eyes. Above her mother hovered a huge washerwoman, like a dallak from the hammams, the kind who wash you with a rough sack over their hands. She was wearing a lungi cloth around her waist, her fingers tangled in a web of string.